Category Archives: News

In the latest New Scientist is a report on British American Tobacco’s acquisition of an e-cigarette company and apparently “is now planning to ask the UK authorities to recognise one of its products as a smoking-cessation medicine”.

Most of us pro-harm reductionists and vapers in general much prefer the recreational designation of e-cigarettes for more than one reason.

If medicalized they will 1. have the same sort of gestation times that new drugs to market do (years and years of testing) 2. limited availability 3. greater restrictions on the forms they might take (less choice for the consumer) and 4. power will be concentrated into fewer hands (only large companies like BAT will be able to afford the testing requirements).

If not medicalized, if recreational consumer products, they will 1. remain available subject to conforming to consumer protection guidelines 2. they will be as available as cigarettes (and isn’t that pretty important?) and 3. you are more likely to have one that suits your needs.

Ironically if categorized as medicine the immediate effect will be a harm to public health in making smokers wait years til they are cleared. (Of course, if BAT is pushing for medicalization it is most likely because they now that would give them quite the edge since few other groups could pony up the funds to join the party).

There is also the distinct possibility that as medicines they will be allowed a greater latitude in harm than is allowed in consumer products. Champix would have never been considered safe enough as a consumer product but somehow as medicine having a shot at quitting smoking is worth the risk of suicide.

But perhaps there is a third way – a compromise. Two distinct products not unlike the relationship of the pharmaceutical inhalers and e-cigarettes.

Why not leave the recreational e-cigarette available while allowing a product that is similar but tested as a cessation device. Big Tobacco and Big Pharma could market their cessation e-cigarettes in competition with regular e-cigarettes.

Imagine all of us vapers as runners (I know at least a few of us must be). We have a choice between running the streets, out in the country, in the woods, changing our pace as it suits us, and then we have the option of a treadmill. Roughly the same but oh so different.

That’s the post.

On a separate note I would like to announce the publication of a collaboration between James Dunworth and myself on an ebook Electronic Cigarettes: What the Experts Say

This collection of interviews with scientists, activists and users, compiled over 4 years of writing for the Ashtray Blog, explores whether the electronic cigarette is really safe – and what is behind the campaign against them. (For more details on the contents)

All profits will be donated to The Consumer Advocates for Smoke-Free Alternatives Association (CASAA) and to the E-Cigarette Consumer Association of the UK (ECCA UK). You can download the book at either Amazon UK or Amazon USA.

In the wake of the recent uproar regarding the Daily Mail’s “E-cigarette’s can cause more harm than smoking” (see Clive Bates for the before and after pictures of the webpage – deleted after a formal Press Complain was lodged) and the Marie Claire’s “Fears e-cigarettes could be more harmful than smoking” not to mention the iterations in Pakistan and India and who knows where else and not to forget the descent into madness at the Philippine Star, it’s pleasing to report that not all the news is nonsense.

In early January we had the Lionel Shriver article in the Guardian and just today in the National Post we have Jesse Kline’s “E-cigarettes are not your father’s smokes.” A couple of days ago we had Jacob Sullum at reason.com with “How E-Cigarette Alarmists Endanger Smokers’ Lives, or Why Eli Lake Should Not Switch Back to Marlboros.” And back in January at the Globe and Mail Lucy Kellaway wrote “Why e-cigarettes should be allowed in the office.”

When this blog began, e-cigarettes were hardly known and the most prominent safer nicotine alternative was smokeless tobacco, it was rare to ever find any positive coverage in the media. Though e-cigarettes do get a fair share of bad press they almost get as much good. Of course the bad articles seem to get all the traction.

NYT’s Tierney tells some truth about e-cigs
The New York Times’ technology pundit provocateur, John Tierney, devoted his periodic column to e-cigarettes and how it is odd that there is such opposition to them. It is a very good article, though it contains nothing that those familiar with the issues have not known for years (indeed, Tierney is guilty of writing as if he were producing insights when he is just reciting observations that could be found in, say, this blog). What is most interesting about it, though, is what it shows about the way that even sympathetic members of “the 1%”, as it were, tend to think about this issue: as being about the authorities, not the people. Though there is much talk about the choice to consume nicotine, consumers feel absent from the piece. Their preferences are represented by observations by Rodu and Godshall, who are good choices, and the little study by Polosa that we discussed last time (and re that, see the preceding entry above). But in addition, he cites groups that have good messages but are really only just a couple of people (American Association of Public Health Physicians, American Council on Science and Health) while completely ignoring the user community and its much larger organizations. Finally, he treats the fight as being a Democrat-Republican thing, which is typical corporate media simplification, and treats anti-THR activists in the “public health” community as a curiosity, rather than an existential threat, and does not seriously examine their ethics or motives (the motives of users are subtly suspect, but powerful organizations always get a pass in the NYT). Some have said “wow, great, who ever expected this in the NYT” and they have a point; but we say “it is too bad that this is better than the best we can ever expect in the NYT”.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/science/e-cigarettes-help-smokers-quit-but-they-have-some-unlikely-critics.html

The centuries old quest for prohibition isn’t about health, nor has it ever been. It’s still just a bunch of mentally unbalanced psychos adhering to unthinking, and largely unattainable, dogma without care for the deeply anti-social – and regularly lethal – consequences of their actions.

Rodu’s town-based switching experiment makes the national news
Stories appeared in WaPo and USA Today, as well as numerous local papers. Sadly, the article (there appears to be just one, running in multiple papers), is not great. It leads with the reason this project is a good idea. Unfortunately, anyone who keeps reading will see an emphasis on the controversy rather than the science, and will likely not understand that switching is extremely beneficial.Google News (note: WaPo no longer hosts copy)http://yourlife.usatoday.com
And there is much worse out there, with some articles that still seems to include a THR message containing colossally-stupid comments from the anti-THR activists. When Matthew Myers says “more research is needed before anyone should suggest that the nation’s 46 million smokers would be better off using smokeless tobacco”, you have to wonder if he is afraid to travel because more research is needed about that whole “you can’t fall off the edge of the Earth” thing.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-urges-smokers-smokeless-tobacco.html?mid=51534

New York Magazine explains the tech, appeal, and benefits of e-cigarettes
The content is simplistic, naive, and dated, as we expect from unhealthful news reporting, but it is mostly right and appropriately positive. This one gets a B+, putting it at the top of the curve for recent old media articles about THR.http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/topic/e-cigarettes-2011-10/

RJR reports ST replacing smoking, though not Altria
RJR sales were down about 7% for cigarettes but snus (dominated by Camel Snus) was up about the same percentage. Altria reported cigarettes down but its established (US Smokeless) and unsatisfying (Marlboro Snus) ST brands did not see the rise that Camel did.http://files.shareholder.com (pdf)http://www.altria.com

Survey finds fairly decent awareness about e-cigarettes
The American Legacy Foundation was undoubtedly distressed to find that over half of American adults surveyed have heard of e-cigarettes, and 5% had tried them. Of those who had heard of them, two thirds knew they were less harmful than smoking. (h/t to Godshall for finding this SRNT poster)http://www.legacyforhealth.org/Ecigs.pdf

Another ANTZy e-cig study
This is not a terrible study if you just look at the results and not the rhetoric; it is yet another confirmation that e-cigarette use is increasing nicely. Sadly, the authors make every effort to spin this as a bad thing and suggest — in spite of the fact that their results confirm what we know, that e-cigarettes are used by smokers to quit — that youth initiation is a cause for concern. Aside: It is a pretty good clue that if someone uses the term “ENDS” instead of “e-cigarette”, they are either ANTZ or trying to impress ANTZ. Avoiding the established natural term for a product is a thinly veiled way of saying “we are going to show our superiority to those degenerates who use this product by refusing to use their terminology.” Of course it is a pretty good clue when the report is from an anti-tobacco extremist organization (US CDC) and published in an anti-tobacco quasi-journal.
(thanks to Kate at vapersnetwork.org)http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/27/tobaccocontrol-2011-050044.abstract

Biotech company attempts to eliminate the benefits of smoking while keeping the costs
The company, 22nd Century Group, has engineered tobacco plants to be almost nicotine free, and are touting these as harm reduction (though you will notice that we did not put this entry in the THR section — quite intentionally). Normally we ignore that company, which giving the Zeller/Hatsukami crowd a run for their money in trying to co-opt and abuse the term “THR”, and even have “exclude if it contains…” parameters for them in our THR web search bots because they seem to send out a press release that includes the phrase “tobacco harm reduction” any time they do anything more interesting than change the toner in their office printer. But they managed to make the NYT. Not surprisingly, that article quotes several anti-THR activists but no one who actually supports THR, and implies that removing the nicotine from tobacco is a good thing. This fits the prohibitionist agenda (no doubt everyone quoted in the story is quietly lobbying for, and drooling about, FDA regulations that would mandate unacceptably low nicotine levels in products) as well as playing on the naivety/propaganda that classifies nicotine as a bad thing.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/health/research/cigarettes-are-being-used-in-studies-to-help-smokers-quit.html

Researchers look for grand unifying theory of prohibition
First they torture mice to support a claim that nicotine exposure might prime the brain to appreciate cocaine. Then they report that one particular 2003 dataset (of course there is no cherrypicking there) shows that cocaine dependence was higher (whatever that means) when the user smoked before first using cocaine rather than the opposite order, which supposedly supports the claim (because …um… this effect of nicotine magically disappears if it is not used first??). Finally, “Now that we have a mouse model of the actions of nicotine as a gateway drug this will allow us to explore the molecular mechanisms by which alcohol and marijuana might act as gateway drugs,” said Eric Kandel, M.D., of Columbia University Medical Center and a senior author of the study. We would add a joke, but irony is kind of dead here.http://www.nida.nih.gov/newsroom/11/NR11-02.html

Siegel offers clever analysis of how pro-pharma researchers bias smoking cessation study results
By chopping the “cold turkey” category into lots of subsets (“watched a video”, “called a hotline”, etc.) and then including a “none” category that includes only those odd individuals who did not so much as looked at a website, the junk researchers can make the “none” category look bad and suggest that pharma product use is common compared to other options. Michael Siegel, true to form, attributes this bias to pharma industry funding, and in this particular case that is a fairly compelling story. Naturally, there is no mention of THR in the government/pharma methodology, or in Siegel’s critique of it.http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/11/bias-against-cold.html

Healthy People 2020 = HP2010 with a little white-out
The Healthy People 2020 goals for tobacco use are out. What a surprise, they’ve decided to retain their goal for 2010, hoping that only 12% of people will be smoking in 2020, while neglecting to include the one thing that might actually help them achieve this: tobacco harm reduction. Indeed, they repeatedly try to imply that smokeless tobacco use has a major impact on health.http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topicsobjectives2020/overview.aspx?topicid=41

Naive “smokers all want to quit” message continues to damage public health
An MMWR report making this claim got a lot of press. The problem is that all such survey questions conflate “I want to stop using this drug” with “I wish I could be as happy/productive/focused/etc. as I am while on this drug, but to do so without the drug”, and so lead to the erroneous conclusion that tools to just quit (but not replace the benefit of the drug) are all we need. By their standards, most everyone wants to quit sleeping too, so we should be happy that they do not push psychosis-inducing drugs in support of that too.http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6044a2.htm

Not content to denegrate science in the name of anti-tobacco, they are now playing with the cornerstone of Abramic religion
An ANTZ group calling itself Physicians and Nurses Against Tobacco introduces a campaign to declare the eleventh Commandment to be “Don’t smoke”, after another fringe group declared cigarettes to be non-kosher. Yes, really. Still looking for a limit to how far these people will go.http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/11/prweb8941006.htm

Compared to trying to rewrite Exodus, everything else looks pretty good…
…still, this is too dumb to not mention: The state of Missouri gave approval to a group led by the American Cancer Society to create a ballot referendum for a tax increase on cigarettes and a huge increase on smokeless tobacco. Combining the wisdom of the general population in setting tax policy with the ANTZealotry of ACS — what could go wrong?http://www.sos.mo.gov/news.asp?id=1022

Australia plain packaging fight goes on
There is a lot of noise, but we will not bother you with details or links. When something actually happens, we will cover it.

Smoking now code for America’s traditional valuing of freedom?
The Herman Cain campaign ad with its not-so-subtle smoking has gotten a lot of press. There is no agreement on what it means, but it might be that “denormalization” of smoking has finally turned it into a symbol of oppression, and that use of smoking imagery is not just teenage rebellion, but a revolutionary symbol about “reclaiming the real America” or some such. It is just so sad that in American politics, concern about liberty is so often bundled with… well, people like Herman Cain.http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qhm-22Q0PuM

**Note to readers: If you have written something you wish to see included in the weekly readings, or produce a relevant news feed that we might be missing, please call it to our attention. If you think we missed a specific THR story of note in the previous week, let us know and we can include it the following week. Finally, if you figure you are someone whose feed we are using to help us collect stories — you can probably guess who you are — and would like to be sure to get an occasional hat-tip, let us know and we would be glad to do it (and please do the same for us if we are helping you).

Triangulating on anti-tobacco extremism
Why is an article about cigarette litter a must read? Well, we often argue that anti-THR is primarily motivated by anti-tobacco extremist who recognize that if low-risk tobacco products become popular, then there is no way their extreme goal — eliminating all tobacco use — will ever happen. Thus, they have the incentive to keep tobacco use a deadly as possible (discouraging harm reduction), which also introduces the other side of extremism: Being unconcerned with the damage caused by pursuit of the goal. Chris Snowdon writes about a similar phenomenon, the extremists fighting efforts to reduce the litter caused by smoking. The parallel is quite remarkable: an attempt to increase the damage done, and a willingness to damage valued social institutions (anti-litter or beautification groups) to do it. Not as bad as damaging public health, of course, but perhaps it even better supports our extremist hypothesis that some people still insist is just too cynical to be true.http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2011/10/cigarette-butts-some-loony-proposals.html

Amusing Enough Not to Miss

Anti-tobacco researchers are just funny
This week’s amusing publications in anti-tobacco blogs (they call them scientific journals, but we think our characterization is more accurate) include the Minnesota ANTZ farm writing a letter claiming that US tobacco companies could have lowered carcinogen levels in smokeless tobacco products, but did not. So, let’s see: The level of these particular chemicals that are believed to be carcinogenic (though the evidence is hardly conclusive) has come down dramatically, but in any case ST products with higher old levels of the chemicals have not been observed to cause cancer based on extensive epidemiology. So any benefit from this change is speculative and would have to be too small to measure. So what part of this do they not understand? Oh, right, the science part.http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/20/6/443.short?rss=1

From Australia (of course), a screed about how terrible illicit trade in tobacco is, and how health agencies should just do something about smuggling and black markets even though they have absolutely no capacity to do so (for a hint on how well this will work, you might want to read any recent news report from Mexico). But they better not dare cooperate with the companies, who actually have some tools for combating smuggling, because that would mean tobacco control would have to act like grownups and recognize that generally one shares a lot of common ground with one’s opponents, and that they are not actually Voldemort or smallpox. (Note also the parallels between this and the “must read” story above.)http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/20/6/436.short?rss=1

And Prue Talbot “discovered” that off-the-shelf e-cigarettes perform differently from each other, in terms of puffing force and time that is needed and such, and sometimes there is variation within a brand. We are shocked! to learn that e-cigarette users need to exert control over what they do and sometimes vary it in order to make the products work for them; could you imagine if that were the case for, say, food or cars… oh, wait. The concluding call for better quality control would seem much more honest if the ANTZ had not intentionally abdicated regulating e-cigarette quality by trying to ban them instead of helping make them better.http://ntr.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/11/ntr.ntr164.abstract

We realize that reporting anti-tobacco researchers’ poor understanding of how science and the world work may be on par with flatulence jokes, in terms of how creative the humor is. We will try to restrain ourselves for a few posts before doing it again. Oh, and we would like to note that we did not mention Stanton Glantz at all, so we did show some restraint.

Other THR

Rodu rips New England Journal of Medicine’s extremist commentary
Rodu points out (not in so many words) that commentary reads like it was written in the dark ages, with an unattenuated “quit or die” message, along with praise for the mythical promise of anti-smoking drugs. We suppose this is not too surprising since most institutions’ (e.g., medics’) understanding of smoking and the future of tobacco use is indeed trapped in a dark age.http://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-england-journal-of-medicine.html

US considering ban on e-cigarettes on airplanes
The debate rages about this. There is a good case to be made for banning lots of things in an extremely confined and technologically dangerous situation. We could certainly get behind airplane bans on peanuts (a dangerous allergen that aerosolizes), perfume at a “characterizing” level of concentration, applying nail polish (actually already banned because of flammability, but not well enforced), and not showering. And maybe loudly talking to a stranger about inanities rather than, heaven forbid, actually reading a book. Vapor from an e-cig seems to fit that theme, with possibly unwanted smells and ever-so-slightly dangerous technology. The question is, would the ban be made for the right reason, or is it just a backdoor way to try to prevent people from using low-risk products, like the ban on smokeless tobacco that some airlines were talked into (and that, fortunately, is quite trivial to ignore).http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kate-hanni/dot-proposes-ecigarette-b_b_1018004.html

Banning of smokeless tobacco in baseball in the news again
This total non-issue continues to obsess a certain ilk of ANTZ, and they go berserk about it every year at the time of the championship series. This time there is a orchastrated astroturf campaign of hundreds of commentaries and letters, and the campaigners have picked up some prominent politicians. The funny thing is that putting an end to the constant spitting in well-watched close-up television images would probably be a boon to THR, exactly what the ANTZ want to avoid. A few young baseball players might quit using chewing tobacco (which would be fine, so long as they did not smoke instead) but a lot more people would overcome their irrational opposition to snus-like products based on the spitting which they do not require. So all-in-all, if this is how the anti-ST people want to spend their time and political capital, bless ‘em.http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2011/story/_/id/7118541/2011-world-series-senators-urge-baseball-ban-tobacco

Alberta government sells its lucrative tobacco stocks in anticipation of even more lucrative lawsuit
Leave it to the Canadian province of Alberta to find a new height in government hypocrisy about tobacco. The government had no problem taking advantage of the market, even beyond their taxes, which at least are defended by the (inaccurate, dishonest) excuse that they pay for the extra cost of smokers. But since the investment might interfere with simply confiscating the industry’s assets (or following the US lead and imposing hidden taxes on smokers and pretending it is a confiscation), it is time to bury it in a memory hole.http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20111020/alberta-tobacco-investments-111020/

**Note to readers: If you have written something you wish to see included in the weekly readings, or produce a relevant news feed that we might be missing, please call it to our attention. If you think we missed a specific THR story of note in the previous week, let us know and we can include it the following week. Finally, if you figure you are someone whose feed we are using to help us collect stories — you can probably guess who you are — and would like to be sure to get an occasional hat-tip, let us know and we would be glad to do it (and please do the same for us if we are helping you).

Kevin Libin sums up hypocrisy of medics who are pro-HR for heroin, but anti-THR
The National Post’s Libin is probably the strongest voice for THR at a major newspaper. (It includes comments from an interview with Phillips, though he apparently declined to include the observation from that interview: That it is a limousine-liberal class issue: junkies are the highly downtrodden that good “liberals” are supposed to look out for; smokers are the proletariat who should just do what their “betters” tell them to do.)http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/14/kevin-libin-doctors-favour-junkies-over-smokers/?mid=5027

Godshall rips US FDA for focus on lists of chemicals
He recognizes that the inventorying of chemicals in tobacco products is required by law, but urges FDA to downplay the results, since claims that fiddling with chemistry reduce harm for cigarettes (or matter at all for low-risk alternatives) are contrary to FDA’s promised science-based approach. This very short, cogent comment would affect the behavior of anyone with shame about making silly scientific claims. In other words, it will be ignored.http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/legislation-news/230631

British Columbia offering free pharma nicotine
It is kind of an interesting experiment, given that smokeless tobacco is hugely over-taxed and e-cigarettes have to be smuggled in: How much do you have to lower the price of pharma products to make them more attractive for THR. Apparently “free” is sufficient, since there was huge interest on the first day. It will be interesting to see what they do when they figure out that most people taking the offer are not trying to become abstinent.http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111001

Pilot studies of what happens when you kinda sorta recommend a THR product
We are not quite sure what to make of this article, in which combined two small studies in which smokers in two countries were offered a small quantity of free smokeless oral tobacco products under very different protocols, without education or recommendation, to see what they would do. We suggest giving the authors credit for getting a summary of data from the pilots out into the world, but seriously question their choice to draw conclusions based on it. (Iin case you were wondering, this was the last THR article accepted by Harm Reduction Journal before Phillips took over as editor for tobacco articles.)http://www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/8/1/27/abstract

UK grant that claims to be for THR
The National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence awards a grant for “guidance development services”, whatever that means. But regular readers will recall that NICE is basically just trying to co-opt the term THR for business-as-usual extremist approaches (and you will recall that they allowed us to be a “registered stakeholder” for these efforts — until they got our comments, at which time they booted us). So it seems safe to decide that the best we can hope for is that nothing comes of this.http://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:317616-2011:TEXT:EN:HTML

Siegel cleverly challenges disingenuous concern about propylene glycol
In response to trumped up worries about PG exposure from e-cigarettes from several of what he calls “anti-smoking and health groups” (he cannot bring himself to identify the as anti-tobacco extremists), Michael Siegel wonders why they are not calling for a removal of PG in cigarettes. This, of course, is also disingenuous, since the quantity of PG taking in from smoking is much smaller, but that is what makes it such a great “nyah nyah”: force the people who are making anti-scientific claims to try to figure out how to argue the science.http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/10/if-anti-smoking-groups-want-electronic.html

Commentary on how Australia’s costly plain packaging fight is rather silly in light of failure to try THR
David Sweanor does not use most of those words in this brief commentary, but that is the basic message. It contains nothing that our regular readers do not already know, but it is a nice mash-up of the two themes, silly extremist behavior and the basic case for THR.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-3362.2011.00370.x/full

American Legacy Foundation now funding daydreaming
Arguably even sillier than opposing THR while coming up with controversial policy interventions that have measurable effects only in someone’s dreams, Legacy has skipped the policy and skipped right to the dreaming with their book and associated only discussion, “After Tobacco: What Would Happen If Americans Stopped Smoking?” …. Sorry, zoned out there for a minute, thinking about how nice it would be to get paid big bucks to daydream about what will happen when the extremists stop working to prevent THR.http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/after-tobacco-what-would-happen-if-americans-stopped-smoking-131586963.html

Mexico’s black market in cigarettes up 400% in one year due to tax increase
In fairness, it only increased from 2% of the market to 10%, so it is still way short of Canada’s and many other black markets. We were just following the lead of the ANTZ, who would use the huge-sounding relative figure if it was a statistic they wanted to create alarm about.http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?storyid={41869f1b-3316-4052-b006-5c8968fea7d3}

This must mean that Big Pharma is marketing to kids, right?
In a study to be presented at this year’s American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference and Exhibition, it was found that kids and teachers could not tell the difference between medicine and candy 20% of the time. The study was conducted by two seventh-grade students (not yet inculcated in ANTZ thinking patterns) who came to the common sense conclusion that safe storage was the key rather than removing the medicines from the market.http://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=28265

**Note to readers: If you have written something you wish to see included in the weekly readings, or produce a relevant news feed that we might be missing, please call it to our attention. If you think we missed a specific THR story of note in the previous week, let us know and we can include it the following week. Finally, if you figure you are someone whose feed we are using to help us collect stories — you can probably guess who you are — and would like to be sure to get an occasional hat-tip, let us know and we would be glad to do it (and please do the same for us if we are helping you).

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
—Steve Jobs

Their motto: “That didn’t work, let’s do it again.”
Snowdon makes this amusing observation about the prohibitionist factions (the post is related to THR in spirit only, being primarily about anti-alcohol laws in Scotland), but he points out that the observation about the motto certainly applies to anti-tobacco. Hmm, if only there was something that was proven to work — oh, wait, the motto probably extends to “that works, so we had better shut it down”.http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2011/09/scotland-prepares-for-failure.html

FDA “infographic” on their anti-tobacco effort so far
This is not intended to be funny, of course, but you cannot help but laugh at their “historic advances” that represent nothing but sound and fury, including “reducing youth access” (because until FDA showed up, no one thought to make rules that prohibited kids from buying cigarettes, right?). The best is their closer: “Unprecedented knowledge about tobacco products. FDA knows that more than 4,500 tobacco products exist, where they are made, and, for the first time, the ingredients have been revealed to the FDA.” Yeah, that’ll result in beneficial outcomes any day now. Note to Congress: If you put the FTC in charge of tobacco, they will look at advertising; if you put Homeland Security in charge, they will look at smuggling; if you put FDA in charge, they will look at manufacturing. (Also note the last clever caveat in that quote: it is not that the ingredients were not previously revealed, just not to them.) As for THR, there is, of course, no mention. What would they say, after all — “Our efforts to prevent harm reduction have been successful.”?http://www.fda.gov/TobaccoProducts/NewsEvents/ucm273582.htm

RJR subsidiary working on anti-depressant that uses nicotinic receptors
“Most new depression drugs today work by increasing the chemicals serotonin, or serotonin and norepinephrine, in the brain. TC-5214 targets a different set of receptors, known as neuronal nicotinic receptors.” “It seems clear that nicotine, which activates the same receptors, can have antidepressant effects and boost cognition, Heinemann said. It is thought that many smokers and schizophrenics use cigarettes to ‘self-medicate.’” The relevance to THR speaks for itself, we think. (Thanks to Bill Godshall for finding this.)http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/03/us-targacept-idUSTRE79268Z20111003

Swedish Match study published
We commented on this before, but it is now in final form. The study looks at a snus-based smoking cessation intervention and finds it effective. Unfortunately, this approach is a perfect example of “lamp-post” research, precisely measuring something we do not really want to know (what happens when you try to get a naive population to try snus in very artificial situations) rather than a decent measure of what we do want to know (will people adopt THR when they learn about it in realistic circumstances). But we understand why companies are motivated to pursue such studies, to respond to the anti-tobacco extremists who pretend to believe (or maybe they are really that stupid) that randomized trials are more informative about THR than the overwhelming more relevant observational evidence we have.http://www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/pdf/1477-7517-8-25.pdf

Canada also spending a fortune on evaluating tobacco control policies
Unlike the US case, this might actually find something, since the predominant effective intervention (basic education) is not in place everywhere, and there might be a few places that could see a tax increase without tipping into the black market. Still, I would bet that for less than 1/100th the $7.4 million budget, we could create a fake research report now that would be difficult to distinguish from the one that will eventually come form this (“…proven effective regulations were implemented in many countries…” [with no actual proof they are effective included, of course] “…much more needs to be done…blah, blah, blah…”).http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/604836–uw-researcher-gets-big-grant-to-continue-global-tobacco-control-project

Australia seeks other goverments’ backing for plain packaging WTO fight
This is a great illustration of the monomania of the anti-tobacco extremists. The WTO has serious flaws that hurt poor people, but some parts of it work as well as we might legitimately hope for, like the parts that push back against pick-and-choose protectionism. But the ANTZ are willing to impose radical and thoughtless change on it to salvage one policy that any sensible analyst realize will accomplish approximately nothing.http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/06/us-australia-tobacco-idUSTRE7953S820111006

Health economist proposes pay-to-quit approach for poor smokers
In an op-ed, Jody Sindelar proposes that smokers who receive Medicaid (the US medical fund for poor people) be paid to quit. What is interesting about this is that it clearly recognizes smoking as a consumption choice and thus changing the cost-benefit calculus can affect it. Also very positive is her proposal that proof be in the form of CO monitoring, and thus adopting THR would count as quitting, as it should. It would be a very interesting experiment to learn how many of these smokers will quit for what price, and thus how great the net benefits of smoking are for them. Not addressed is the problem one of us (CVP) wrote about in his dissertation (and that later became called the “anti-commons” in economics, for those interested): Paying people to give up something they have a right to do, but usually do not choose to do, creates the incentive to “discover” that you want to exercise that right in order to be paid to stop. How long does a non-smoker have to smoke before she is eligible for the quit smoking payments?http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/opinion/sindelar-smoking-medicaid/?hpt=he_c2

An interesting take on the corner anti-tobacco has put itself in
We missed this interesting column about the rise of activist smokers from Frank Davis during our thin coverage in September. The post (and its interesting comments) picks up on the paranoia of anti-tobacco researchers who justify their suspicious (to be charitable) research practices based on claims of threats. Davis argues that grassroots smoker activism is growing, which might contrast with our observations that the much smaller number of e-cigarettes users have created a more effective sense of identity and social movement.http://cfrankdavis.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/letter-to-linda/

New American Legacy Foundation report calls for torturing mental health sufferers
The report is about how “tobacco use”, their misleading way of saying “smoking”, is common among those with diagnosable mental illness, which is common knowledge among experts on either tobacco or mental illness. They cleverly avoid pointing out that the reason for this is that nicotine is such a great drug for treating many psychological conditions and demand efforts to make them stop (without, of course, substituting low-risk nicotine). It would certainly be worth looking for cases where use may do more harm than good in this population, but we are never going to get an honest analysis of that from those with a huge obvious conflict of interest (i.e., they are dedicated to the elimination of tobacco). Speaking of COI, it is really interesting in their press release about this, Legacy aggressively acts to hide their huge COI, describing themselves as “dedicated to helping Americans live longer, healthier lives” without saying their real mission is to eliminate tobacco use.http://www.legacyforhealth.org/4736.aspx

New marketing survey about tobacco use, including “dual use”
Some interesting information for those who follow the market — likely better than the “public health” surveys. We notice with amusement that multiple product use is strongly correlated with watching football and NASCAR. Someone needs to tell Glantz — we would just love to see him sending letters to the NFL and NASCAR threatening them.http://www.cspnet.com/news/tobacco/articles/make-most-multis-0

Louisiana hospital bans “thirdhand smoke”
Perhaps not as destructive as trying to set the precedent for ignoring the WTO, but more troublesome about what it says about the ivory tower of allopathic medicine, a move is afoot to engage in employment discrimination against anyone who has been near smoking. How long until smokers are no longer allowed to visit dying relatives or attend the birth of their baby (we hope that at least the latter prohibition will apply only to the fathers).http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/10/03/louisiana-hospital-to-ban-odor-smoke-on-workers-clothes/?test=latestnews

**Note to readers: If you have written something you wish to see included in the weekly readings, or produce a relevant news feed that we might be missing, please call it to our attention. If you think we missed a specific THR story of note in the previous week, let us know and we can include it the following week. Finally, if you figure you are someone whose feed we are using to help us collect stories — you can probably guess who you are — and would like to be sure to get an occasional hat-tip, let us know and we would be glad to do it (and please do the same for us if we are helping you).

Dear Readers:
As you probably noticed, we have not kept up our weekly schedule of suggested readings. Unfortunately, we were too busy to keep up and are now too busy to catch up with our usual format of summarizing and analyzing the readings (as you might know, none of us receive any compensation for doing this). However, we want to try to keep a fairly comprehensive list of suggested readings, for the record, so we are catching up now by offering little more than a list of headlines and links, without much analysis for most of them (think of it as being Twitter-style). Chances are that the breadth of our coverage is unintentionally off a bit, in addition to the depth being intentionally reduced.
We hope to resume our usual value-added in October.
–THR.o

American Legacy Foundation reports some good news about RJR and Altria snus test markets
29%, 20% and 6% of male smokers aged 18-24, 25-35 and 36-49 respectively tried using snus, that 9% of female smokers aged 18-24 tried using snus. Naturally, anti-tobacco extremist legacy spun this as being bad because it is so high, while those of us interested in public health see it as an impressive level of success.http://www.legacyforhealth.org:80/4695.aspx

Phillips now editor of tobacco articles at Harm Reduction Journal
HRJ Editor-in-Chief Ernest Drucker has appointed Carl V Phillips to the position of Senior Editor in charge of tobacco-related articles. Some interesting related projects are afoot, so stay tuned. The immediate impact is clearing out the backlog, so that tobacco papers submitted to HRJ are now all on a fast-track. (This has been in the works for a while, so some of you who were watching might have thought it had already happened, but it really just started in the past week or two.)

Boston will regulate e-cigarettes as cigarettes.
THR supporters quite reasonably consider this to be a step backward, but the treating of e-cigs like cigarettes (i.e., no worse, so no bans) is a lot better than the worst-case scenarios that the anti-tobacco extremists are pursuing.http://www.boston.com/Boston/whitecoatnotes/2011/09

FDA’S Deyton suggests he does not understand the desire to smoke, or science
How does he reconcile “I like the pure joy of exploration of applying scientific principles to the good of the population” with making scientifically-honest health-improving THR information and action almost impossible. The article is about him being up for some award, but that part is not very interesting.http://www.thecre.com/tpsac/?p=1671

Condemnation of US proposal to dramatically raise smokeless tobacco tax
Criticism came from the usual THR media spokesmen (Godshall, Ballin), but also Kathleen Dachille, director of the Center for Tobacco Regulation at the University of Maryland School of Law: “There’s the potential that by raising the smokeless-tobacco tax, you could lead smokers to stick with cigarettes rather than potentially less-harmful alternatives because the alternatives are just as costly.”http://www2.journalnow.com/business/2011/sep/11/wssunbiz01-bill-would-raise-taxes-on-all-types-of–ar-1374156/

New Zealand scientists to research whether e-cigarettes are effective in helping smokers quit
Next they will be checking to see if the world is round, which is pretty critical for them in New Zealand since it keeps them from falling off the edge. In fairness, it is possible that such a study can help deal with government red tape that currently results in a ban, but it is still sad that artificial research projects with very narrow implications are considered more useful than the actual evidence.http://www.3news.co.nz/Electronic-cigarette-debate-sparks-up-again/tabid/420/articleID/225511/Default.aspx

Surprisingly honest info about nicotine use by pharma company
No, it is obviously not GSK — it is Johnson & Johnson’s information for Canadian Nicorette customers. This bit about addiction is predictably silly, but the rest makes a nice case for THR.http://www.nicorette.ca/quit-smoking/nicotine-myths.aspx

US Department of Transportation on its way to banning e-cigarettes on planes
A reasonable policy as part of their proposed ban on perfumes, failure to bathe, and other possibly offensive outgassing — oh, they are not going to ban those too. Damn. (At least it is not as bad as Delta Airlines’ unilateral and totally pointless prohibition against smokeless tobacco; fortunately it is rather trivial to violate with impunity, but it is still a good reason to seek another airline.)http://blogs.star-telegram.com/sky_talk/2011/09/dot-proposes-ban-on-electronic-cigarettes-on-flights.html

Cuba claims to have highly effective anti-lung-cancer drug
If true, this could be very annoying to the anti-tobacco extremists, who dislike anything that makes tobacco use less harmful. It also would substantially change the comparative risk calculations, making all those inaccurately conservative pundits who say “…90-95% less harmful that smoking…” close to right (because the denominator would get smaller).http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/08/cimavax-egf-cuba-announce_n_954630.html

Related Topics

Same source: different results. Two federal surveys differ by over 7 million in adult smoking counts but smoking is in the decline…or is it?
To paraphrase Rodu’s analysis with an eye to THR, the ANTZ use the low number to claim we do not need THR because smoking is going away (which even the low number does not remotely suggest) and the high number to demand more funding for themselves.http://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-many-americans-smoke.html

The World Health Organization announces the theme of World No Tobacco Day 2012
Announced on the Facebook page for the Framework Convention Alliance, the theme will be “Tobacco Industry Interference”. Notice that this theme has absolutely nothing to do with improving public health, but at least it is not like the year Henningfield wrote the policy statement (and we launched THR.o in response).https://www.facebook.com/#!/FrameworkConventionAlliance

…though we could clearly use a bit more housecleaning: FDA TPSAC member Neal Benowitz grossly misrepresents evidence on tobacco harm reduction and smokeless tobacco
Analysis by Bill Godshall and Elaine Keller (scroll down) with link to original op-ed.http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/legislation-news/226992

For anyone who still thinks that political influence and financial corruption comes primarily from industry…
Glantz et al. received a new $2.6 million grant to study state and local anti-smoking efforts to determine which are most effective (spoiler alert: the best is Utah’s clever tactic of having people raise their babies as Mormons, followed by communities that are clever enough to be rich so that people have easy access to other drugs and sources of satisfaction). Not surprisingly, this is the same pig-at-the-trough who is demanding states spend all of their enormous MSA sales tax on anti-tobacco, based on the absurd fiction that this produces immediate savings elsewhere in the budget.http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/Smoking/28358
Meanwhile, Glantz tries to protect the cigarette market by offering testimony against allowing people to be informed about THR, and further demonstrates his complete incompetence as a scientist with various claims.https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/submission-fda-docket-scientific-evaluation-modified-risk-tobacco-product-applications

Cannabis use up in US
The stories are about “illicit drug use” being up, but it is entirely driven by cannabis; this potentially creates more demand for smoke-reducing HR tactics. Amusing is the alarmist remark by the government about not knowing why this is happening, but wanting to do something about this before the users end up in trouble — because we all know that young adults using reefer leads to idleness, loss of motivation, and unemployment …er… is it maybe the other way around.http://www.doctorslounge.com/index.php/news/hd/22935

No industry or NGO’s allowed to attend International Tobacco Regulators’ Conference
Welcome back to the days of monarchy, when governments talked to each other about how to better enforce their will, and simply did not care what anyone else thought about it.http://blsmeetings.net/FDAWHOTobaccoRegulatorsConference

**Note to readers: If you have written something you wish to see included in the weekly readings, or produce a relevant news feed that we might be missing, please call it to our attention. If you think we missed a specific THR story of note in the previous week, let us know and we can include it the following week. Finally, if you figure you are someone whose feed we are using to help us collect stories — you can probably guess who you are — and would like to be sure to get an occasional hat-tip, let us know and we would be glad to do it (and please do the same for us if we are helping you).

A tool equally suited for good or evil
We are not quite sure how this will play out if taken to its extreme, but it is quite a funny use of the “write your representative” forms (just read it — we cannot do it justice). One promising feature of the approach is that it might force minority zealots to confront their delusion that everyone agrees with their pet cause.http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2011/09/useful-website.html

Other THR

US CDC reports trivial drop in smoking during 2005-2010
The 1.6 percentage point drop in adult smoking prevalence, along with an increase in the portion of those smoking less than 10 cigarettes per day, bears a remarkable similarity to the increase in use prevalence for low risk tobacco/nicotine products. That is not how they spun it, of course, not admitting that the reduction was embarrassingly small given the all-out war on smokers …er… we mean smoking (a linear extrapolation gives us the great bumper sticker: “Smoke-free by 2071”) and certainly not that it could probably be explained by THR.http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm60e0906a1.htm?s_cid=mm60e0906a1_w

US FDA scientific advisory panel adds Thomas Eissenberg
In another blow to THR and triumph for crappy health science, they unsurprisingly did not add one of the researchers who have devoted their careers to doing good science to improve public health through THR (leaving the count of such members at zero). Instead, they quietly added a supposed expert on reduced risk products whose best known “contribution” to THR research is an article that claimed that e-cigarettes do not deliver any nicotine. When a scientist discovers that his results contradict what hundreds of authors have previously claimed and hundreds of thousands of people seem to have experienced, he tries to fix his methods or writes about how he has found an exception; when an anti-THR “researcher” gets such a result, he publishes it and implies it is universally true. It is getting pretty close to time for us to say, to those who thought FDA control would be good for public health, “we told you so!”http://www.fda.gov/AdvisoryCommittees/CommitteesMeetingMaterials/TobaccoProducts

FDA study confirms what we know about e-cigarettes
Though they are presumably setting out to increase fear, the only real caution in it: It would be better if the nicotine dosage was a bit more consistent given stated concentration. Gee, if we only had someone who could regulate products that people want – to make sure they are of high quality. Godshall (via email – no link) put it rather more bluntly: “New lab report by FDA prohibition and propaganda conspirator(s) finds nothing hazardous in e-cigarettes; but abstract fails to acknowledge that finding, while falsely referring to vapor as “smoke” and feigning concerns for e-cigarette consumers.”http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10826076.2011.572213

South Korean court rules that e-cigarettes have same restrictions as cigarettes
This was a defeat for the manufacturer, who was advertising in ways that were not permitted for cigarettes. But this, along with the explosion in consumption described in the article, suggests that e-cigarettes have a promising future in Korea if they genuinely will not be more restricted than their high-risk cousins. The banning of vaping wherever smoking is banned is not helpful, but there is always room for improvement.http://tobaccoreporter.com/home.php?id=498&art=5018

Star Scientific loses lawsuit against RJR
The court ruled that RJR did not infringe on a patent for toxicant-reducing leaf processing for cigarettes. The company’s market cap dropped by about 40% as a result, reminding us that it is functionally a patent holding company, as much as we would like to think of it as a supplier of THR consumer goods.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/business/star-scientific-loses-bid-for-patent-royalties.html
Meanwhile, Star launched a new product using an alkaloid derived from tobacco that is claimed to have immune system benefits, though we doubt it will make up for much of the patent loss. For those who do not know, U.S. law is odd, freely allowing “herbal supplements” with medicinal properties. Contrary to the ANTZ* canard that tobacco product would be banned if they were introduced now, they almost certainly would be allowed under U.S. law and nicotine would be embraced as one of the great discoveries of herbal medicine.http://newhope360.com/news/star-scientific-launches-anatabloc-dietary-supplement-0

(*)It is our understand that credit goes to CASAA’s Kristin Noll-Marsh for coining the term “ANTZ” (anti-nicotine and tobacco zealot) which is nicely concise and just too good to pass up. In most of our formal writing we will stick to the term we coined, “anti-tobacco extremists” (sometimes modified as anti-nicotine extremists or anti-tobacco/nicotine extremists) because it is more technically accurate and because it is less whimsical. But look for the much catchier “ANTZ” to find its way into the lexicon.
For those who do not recall and might be interested, the “extremist” construction is a simple descriptive reference to someone who (a) seems willing to pay most any price to eliminate tobacco use (including not caring about the lost benefits to users, social upheaval, crime, discrimination, etc.) and (b) does not make a major distinction between low-risk and high-risk tobacco products (and thus cannot be said to be motivated by health concerns, and thus is clearly just anti-tobacco per se). A good thought experiment to consider the choice between a world free of tobacco and a world where people could enjoy the benefits of tobacco with no measurable risk of life-threatening disease; any humanitarian or true public health advocate would choose the latter, while most of the anti-tobacco community demonstrate their extremism by calling for the former.

…oh, and the new Uppsala University propagandists at it again too
See the last recommended reading for a paper where they teamed with the old established group of unethical “researchers” from Karolinska. This time that group is touting a conference presentation (so nothing but unbacked assertions to analyze) that apparently suggests that myocardial infarction victims who quit using snus reduced their medium-term mortality by half compared to those who kept using snus. If this were true, it would be potentially important and useful information about a subgroup that could see a measurable health benefit from quitting snus, in contrast with the average user. Unfortunately, because these people produce so much junk science, it would be impossible to know if it were true, and thus whether it should be part of honest educators’ advice about snus, just one more bit of damage caused by long-term dishonesty.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110829070505.htm

Keller commentary on silly “do no harm” rhetoric
A somewhat different approach to responding to the absurd “we cannot support THR because low-risk tobacco products have risk, and we are supposed to do no harm”. We tend to focus on the economic analysis that shows that such an analysis of “do no harm” forbids ever taking any action — since any action might, theoretically, result in a worse outcome than not acting — but also forbids taking no action. A third alternative reply is to simply ask “you are not really that stupid, are you?”, but it turns out this is often not effective.http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/blogs/vocalek/1887-first-control-damage.html

Related Topics

Harm Reduction International gets major UK government grant
Will this funding for illicit drug harm reduction help HRI (formerly and better known as IHRA) be a more effective independent voice or are they becoming another captured, formerly-independent QUANGO. The best test seems like it will be their policy toward an area of harm reduction that the British government opposes, tobacco. Since government funding has managed to silence most of the former UK supporters of THR who take it, we are not optimistic.http://www.ihra.net/contents/1067

NYT op-ed chronicles prohibitionism in the context of other politics
It is a very interesting piece by Timothy Egan, as much for what it does not say. His analysis is solid and informative, linking drug prohibitionism to other anti-liberal political efforts. Telling, though, is that he links it (quite rightly) to American right-wing politics, overlooking that most American prohibition initiatives have come from the left. Most tellingly, in decrying destructive prohibition efforts, he somehow manages to completely overlook tobacco/nicotine — and we are shocked! shocked! by this oversight by the NYT (which, in case you do not know, tends to follow the limousine-liberal support for efforts to prohibit of tobacco, junk foods, and most anything else other than alcohol and illicit drugs). Still, it is worth a couple of minutes to read.http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/purists-gone-wild/

Siegel reanalysis shows what FDA data really shows about graphic labels and smoking in Canada
Using a minor variation on the method that FDA used to claim that the data supported the use of graphic warning (sic) labels, Michael Siegel found that the data better support exactly the opposite conclusion. As he points out, this means that the only reasonable conclusion is that the graphics had no effect on smoking (or, more precisely, cannot be said to have had an effect based on this data). This is further evidence of how FDA grasps at straws and embraces junk science in its regulation of tobacco, using a “study” that would not deserve a passing grade as a master’s thesis to make major decisions. (See above for our “I told you so”.)http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/08/fda-analysis-shows-that-graphic.html

Shocking news: Major corporations seeks to influence policy
Should we be surprised that tobacco companies, closed out of normal channels of discourse and free speech, seek ways to communicate with government? A group of anti-tobacco pretend-researchers, publishing in and anti-tobacco journal, seem to think this is news, and use it as an excuse to condemn genuine attempts to improve corporate social responsibility.http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001076

**Note to readers: If you have written something you wish to see included in the weekly readings, or produce a relevant news feed that we might be missing, please call it to our attention. If you think we missed a specific THR story of note in the previous week, let us know and we can include it the following week. Finally, if you figure you are someone whose feed we are using to help us collect stories — you can probably guess who you are — and would like to be sure to get an occasional hat-tip, let us know and we would be glad to do it (and please do the same for us if we are helping you).

US Senate bill would drastically increase tax on smokeless tobacco
For our American readers, we urge you to contact your senators to inform them about the harm this would cause. For more information and analysis, please see CASAA’s page about this, which also includes links for contacting your senators.http://www.casaa.org/news/article.asp?articleID=191&l=a&p

Other THR

Survey results shows low knowledge of low risk from smokeless tobacco and other nicotine ex-smoke
A new analysis of a survey from four anglophone countries confirmed that only a small minority understand that smoke-free nicotine products are low risk. (The exact numbers are, as with any study like this, rather meaningless because they are so sensitive to question phrasing and such.) Sadly, the results showed no time trend toward understanding, but the data ended in 2008 so perhaps there has been some progress since then. The results showed that respondents who answered one question correctly (e.g., saying that smokeless tobacco is lower risk than smoking) were barely more likely to answer the related questions correctly (e.g., saying that NRT is lower risk than smoking); this is interesting because seems to argue against the hypothesis that anti-ST propaganda spills over into ignorance about NRT. Rather, it seems that people’s beliefs are a muddle, suggesting that anti-smoking campaigns have managed to dis-educate people about many of the specifics. However, misinformation about ST was worst in the US, where it is far more popular in the other survey countries, which tends to implicate the anti-ST propaganda.
If you read the paper, we suggest skipping the introduction, which contains some of the usual utter nonsense about the topic (in most cases, skipping the introduction when reading research papers about tobacco is a pretty good strategy, particularly if you want to save time and avoid the urge to delete it before getting to the real content); the rest of it is fairly interesting and seems solid.http://www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/pdf/1477-7517-8-21.pdf

Latvia proposes to tax and otherwise treat e-cigarettes like cigarettes
We heard that the finance ministry is proposing this, but cannot find a report to confirm it. It seems credible and is potentially very important, since it would represent a non-anti-THR stance by a national government. (It is not quite pro-THR if the taxes would be the same as for cigarettes.) Unfortunately, Latvia has a recent history of being pushed around by international institutions, so it seems fairly likely that anti-nicotine extremists at the WHO will stop this from happening.

British Heart Foundation declares that smoke-free nicotine is not a major heart attack risk
We knew that, of course, but it is nice to see the endorsement. Before anyone gets too excited about this organization supporting THR, however, note that this came in a discussion of a new biological measure of nicotine that correlates with heart disease risk and read: ‘”People using nicotine replacement therapy should not be alarmed by this study,” said Ellen Mason of the British Heart Foundation, “as it is the other chemicals inhaled when smoking, such as carbon monoxide that cause the risk of heart disease, not nicotine.”’ Still, it is a great example of how it is impossible to say lots of true things about nicotine and tobacco and not implicitly argue in favor of THR.http://www.naturalnews.com/024667_nicotine_risk_disease.html
(h/t to Julie Woessner for finding this gem buried in the article)

Nice response to Australian e-cigarette policy statement from consumer advocacy group
A point-by-point rebuttal by Australian Tobacco Alternatives Consumer Association.http://ataca.org.au/?page_id=100

Swedish anti-snus group claims that snus increases the risk of heart failure
Since these authors from Karolinska Institute are notorious for producing anti-snus junk science using unethical methodology (and then, in their efforts to cover up what they have done, refusing, in violation of Swedish law, to disclose further information), their claims should not be taken seriously until reviewed in detail by someone else. Caveat emptor if you want to try to interpret the results without the help of someone skilled in forensic epidemiology.http://cpr.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/08/09/1741826711420003.abstract

Prohibitionist group issues notice that US Army smoking restrictions extend to smokeless tobacco
Presumably they are right (referring to only their factual claim regarding the regulation — not most of their propaganda, given that the article claims that ST is as harmful as cigarettes). Fortunately we suspect that this will have little effect on encouraging smoking instead of ST use, though no doubt the activists will do everything they can to discourage use of low-risk products.http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/tobacco/army-restrictions-on-smoking-include-smokeless-tobacco

Denmark has more smoking than Sweden or Norway? Shocking!
This article suggests that the Danish press are unaware of the fact that their Scandinavian neighbors have seen much greater reductions in smoking than Denmark because of the substitution of snus. Or perhaps they just do not want to support proven success, free choice and greater welfare when they can instead call for aggressive restrictions? Maybe Oliver Twist (smokeless tobacco from Denmark, with a licorice flavor that only a Dane could love, and that has managed to fly under the radar of the snus police) can save the day.http://www.cphpost.dk/component/content/52016.html?task=view

Related Topics

A compelling short commentary on addiction
The author notes that addiction needs to be defined in terms of a behavior pattern, a useful message for those who think it can be defined biochemically, let alone those who consider it to be mere consumption of a particular substance. More important, she argues that a critical component of addiction is pleasure flowing too easily from a simple act without investment, which argues against calling thoughtful nicotine use (which THR usually is, and smoking sometimes is) “addiction”.http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/08/19/139753130/addiction-a-disorder-of-knowing

Czech government openly declares that smokers contribute a huge net benefit for government coffers
This is true across rich countries and is common knowledge to experts, but is hidden from the public to justify further increasing the burdens on smokers, and is seldom acknowledged by government. The analysis by the health ministry shows that smokers pay ten times as much in taxes as their estimated extra medical costs. This apparently does not even consider their foregone consumption (reduction in pension payments and such).http://daveatherton.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/the-czech-republic-confirms-that-smokers-pay-ten-times-more-than-they-cost-to-treat/

In an epic reversal of cause and effect, BMJ blames industry for human desires
Discussing the upcoming UN summit on establishing a nanny superstate (they call it a summit on noncommunicable diseases, but you have to read between the lines with these people), an editorial in the medical journal suggested that if efforts to curtail the consumption of nicotine, alcohol, and yummy foods fail it will be because of industry interference. In keeping with typical disconnect between the medical and international ruling classes and the other seven billion of us, there was complete obliviousness to the fact that the industries exist because human beings like the things they are supplying. It just does not occur to those people that nannyism is resisted because people do not want its results. Here is the link if you want to read it, but we suggest not:http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5328.full

Russian advocate predicts cigarette tax increase could impoverish people
Anti-smoking activists are usually oblivious to the damage that their policies do. Tax increases are the only policy intervention that has been proven to be effective, other than the most effective two: general education and THR. But unlike the other two, they do a lot of damage. They just cut into the entertainment budget of even lower-SES Westerners, but in poor countries (which Russia increasingly is) they can interfere with nutrition and schooling. Of course the extremists are just going to say “well then, people should just quit”, which is a dressed up way of saying “the children of anyone who will not obey us deserve to get inadequate nutrition”.http://rt.com/business/news/russia-anti-tobacco-bill-456/

Australian tribunal denies FOI request about plain packaging policy documents
They could at least have required disclosure of all of the government’s evidence that supports the claim that the policy would be beneficial — after all, disclosing an empty folder is not a burden. Last week we reported that Mexico and Indonesia said they would wait to see Australia’s evidence before doing anything like that, and it appears they will be waiting quite a while. The tribunal claim was that it is not in the public interest to release the information about how the government decided to impose this burden on the people; Australia apparently has an odd definition of public interest.http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/tribunal-douses-tobacco-foi-bid/2264816.aspx?src=rss

Commentary demands adult ratings for movies with smoking
Yes, we realize that another repeat of such silliness warrants only a yawn (as does the lack of a similar call for zero tolerance for violence, sexual exploitation, and other staples of PG-13 movies), especially given that it was published by the anti-tobacco and pro-censorship PLoS, a publisher that announced that it would not publish research about THR. The interesting bit is that Simon Chapman wrote the rebuttal, arguing that this would not be useful and was inappropriate censorship. Apparently even a stopped clock correctly interprets the evidence and recognizes an unethical proposal twice an hou… well, maybe more like twice a decade.http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/08/24/smoking-film-rating.html?ref=rss

Psych study of emotional violence images in anti-smoking messages
This has been cited as showing that that disgusting and fear-inducing messages diminish the uptake of warning information, though it really did not show that since it suffered from the usual problem of pschy studies: the measured endpoint is only vaguely related to what the authors claim to have produced evidence about. Even though the results are pretty meaningless, the counter-propaganda value is there: It stands as a counter to the psych research that purports to show that such images do some good (but really does not, for the same reason noted above). For those interested in the actual evidence, there is no real evidence that such imagery accomplishes what it is supposed to, though no affirmative evidence that it has the opposite effect either; the evidence of lack of effect takes the form of the lack of effect where it has been tried.http://www.psycontent.com/content/37424035121r0u13/?p=d2d21166c856423886ac983cc99af287&pi=1
James Dunworth (Ashtray Blog) also contributed his own survey on the topic, which if roughly equally informative, though few people will recognize that fact.http://www.ecigarettedirect.co.uk/ashtray-blog/2011/08/anti-smoking-ads-make-some-smokers-smoke-more.html

Facebook causes teen smoking and other drug use?
Of course not, but it is a textbook example of junk science in action, they type of junk that is the basis for tobacco and other drug policy. The sensationalist headlines resulted from a prohibitionist group’s claiming to have found that the small minority of teens who do not use internet social networking are less likely to consume various drugs, a survey conducted by “researchers” who have apparently never heard of confounding. (We wonder what portion of the “unexposed” group are imprisoned, either literally or de facto, mentally or socially low-functioning, or Amish — seriously.) Here is further analysis of how dumb the claim is:http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2011/08/does-facebook-cause-substance-abuse.html
(In response to this series of VGIF posts, one of us mused that perhaps prohibitionist groups should be classified as religious organizations. That would free them to make whatever faith-based claims they wanted, and save them the embarrassment of the junk science they use to rationalize their views. At the same time, it would allow the public to oppose the actual basis of their claims rather than their rationalizations — “you think the world would be best with prohibition; we disagree.”

**Note to readers: If you have written something you wish to see included in the weekly readings, or produce a relevant news feed that we might be missing, please call it to our attention. If you think we missed a specific THR story of note in the previous week, let us know and we can include it the following week. Finally, if you figure you are someone whose feed we are using to help us collect stories — you can probably guess who you are — and would like to be sure to get an occasional hat-tip, let us know and we would be glad to do it (and please do the same for us if we are helping you).

Vilification of dissolvables
As we reported last week, the Colorado Board of Health held hearings with an eye to condemning the test marketing of dissolvable smokeless tobacco products there. They heard sensible testimony from from many experts (we called in to testify, but the public hearing phase ran out of time before our turn), notably including this from Rodu:http://www.mediafire.com/?jhpucdt792ldg22 (seven minute audio)
Here is a pretty good article published before the hearing:http://www.gazette.com/articles/tobacco-123181-colorado-health.html
After closing the public comments, the board immediately proceeded to ignore it and return to the knew jerk “think of the children — they look like candy!”. No word yet on when they will be banning the Nicorette products that look just like candy (nor, even, any acknowledgment that Camel Orbs would be about the worst tasting, least appealing candy on the market, except for the Star products and Nicorette which taste even worse). Indeed, we have not heard reports of what they decided to do yet, but are not optimistic.

Amusing Enough Not to Miss

Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids calls for Africans to sell tobacco to China
This is just another throw-away complaint about poor countries not obeying their Western masters (i.e., the FCTC), or it would be except for what the FCTC spokeswoman said when scolding Ghana and Malawi for worrying about what would happen to their economies if they lost the cash-crop value of tobacco. She assured them that they could still sell to “countries like China that had huge tobacco industries wanted to depend on Africa for their raw materials”. So is this a promise that they will not try to discourage Chinese from smoking and will encourage them to buy more from Africa? (Hint: People who will say anything, true or false, to try to get what they want, do not make promises.)http://www.ghananewsagency.org/details/Science/Ghana-must-speed-up-legislation-on-tobacco-Patricia-Lambert/?ci=8&ai=32367

Other THR

American Lung Association continues its campaign to keep people smoking
They would, after all, be out of business if THR succeeded. So they are attacking it with some of the most aggressive anti-THR lies out there, reprising the blatant anti-harm-reduction tactics we documented in the early 2000s. The lying is nothing new, but the fact that they have returned to ten-year-old level of unsophistication is kind of interesting.http://wivapers.blogspot.com/2011/08/american-lung-association-continues-to.html

The press dutifully reports those lies, and tells us of someone who quit e-cigarettes as a result
She presumably returned to smoking, though of course this was not reported. There are plenty of anti-THR stories by reporters who are either captured by the anti-nicotine extremists or just not competent to be reporting on health science. But even among those, this one stands out, stating that e-cigarettes are worst than smoking.http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/health/some-say-vaping-e-cigarettes-is-worse-than-smoking-the-real-thing
(The homicidal physicians quoted in that article contrast with a conversation one of us had with a physician recently, who picked up an e-cigarette and casually said: “These things should be in every doctor’s office.”)

U.S. VA makes official anti-e-cigarette declaration
The Department of Veterans Affairs, whose facilities treat more smokers than anyone else in the country, issues a statement condemning e-cigarettes and their use for THR, and suggesting they be treated like smoking. This is presumably part of the current U.S. push to reduce government expenditures, in that it will save substantial medical care costs and pensions for veterans who die earlier as a result of the policy.http://www.va.gov/vhapublications/ViewPublication.asp?pub_ID=2438

On the positive side: e-cigarette success story
This is a great human interest story about someone who successfully quit smoking using e-cigarettes. It is an experienced shared by tens (hundreds?) of thousands of others, of course, but it is still nice to see the story.http://www.thestarpress.com/article/20110817/NEWS01/108170324

Half of all quitters switching to smokeless?
Godshall reports (no link): “After meeting with Reynolds’ management team last week, Wells Fargo Securities tobacco analyst Bonnie Herzog wrote in a 8/15 report “Approximately 1 million adults stop smoking each year and approximately 50% of them end up in the smokeless category.””

Clinical cessation study ignores health differences in contrasting therapies
A new proposed study on whether denicotinized cigarettes or non-nicotine e-cigarettes are the more successful in helping people quit smoking ignores the vast health differences between them. In one case, the same high level of harm is maintained and in the second it is reduced to next to nothing. What is worrisome about studies like this is if that if the nicotine-free cigarette group has greater quitting success it will be widely interpreted by the press and know-nothing public health people as the better product.http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01414998

Siegel almost admits that smokeless tobacco is low risk
It has long been a oddity that oft-quoted activist, Michael Siegel — who is aggressively anti-smoking, but better known for his opposition to misrepresented smoking prohibitions, discrimination against smokers, and tobacco control’s lies — is pro-THR via e-cigarettes, but as far as we recall has always avoided acknowledging the benefits of ST-based THR. This week he came very close to saying that substituting ST is a good way to quit smoking, though he still carefully avoided clearly acknowledging the facts, so presumably will continue in his out-of-character failure to endorse ST.http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/08/15-days-in-jail-for-smoking-in-park.html

Major US cigarette companies sue over graphic labels
The primary issue seems to be their inability to communicate branding or anything else themselves, though they also condemn the misleading “emotionally-charged” pictures (perhaps they picked up our labeling of the graphics as “emotional violence”, nerfing it a bit to be diplomatic). In keeping with the fact that anti-branding protects the market leader, Altria did not join in this suit.http://www.ksl.com/?nid=157&sid=16838353
And perhaps this is getting a bit too talmudic about what is usually shoot-from-the-hip anti-tobacco behavior, but it seems the cancer victim graphic bears a remarkable resemblance to Sigourney Weaver, who portrayed a very dedicated smoker in the movie Avatar. Is it possible that the people behind the graphics are the same ones who are loopy enough to believe that smoking in movies causes most smoking, and are trying to take some kind of voodoo revenge?

Swiss court rules that nicotine addiction is a disease
Primarily this means that insurers (Switzerland is one of the few rich countries without single-payer health care) must cover the cost of anti-smoking pharma (but presumably not if used for THR since the “disease” would then persist). While it may not be optimal for courts to be defining what is and is not a disease, they cannot screw it up any worse than the authors of the DSM. Snowdon offers an interesting analysis of the amusing tension this creates for the anti-tobacco extremists, and extends it into an essay on a related topic that is well worth reading:http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2011/08/medicalisation-of-pleasure.html

US states and Altria join forces to protect their profits
High cigarette taxes have made roll-your-own machines very attractive to smokers, since loose tobacco is taxed at a much lower rate. Naturally, those who profit from the sale of packs of cigarettes (the government, and to a lesser extent the cigarette companies) are mobilizing to put a stop to it.http://reason.com/blog/2011/08/16/sin-taxers-and-big-tobacco-go

Is Australia the Eveready Bunny of Prohibition?
They have taken the lead on demonizing nicotine products (all those not controlled by Big Pharma, anyway). [Aside: Snowdon has a nice summary of the “endgame” view that this represents http://www.thefreesociety.org/Issues/Smoking/planning-for-prohibition .]
They are threatening to apply the same mindset to alcohol, the nannies might be aiming at television viewing next. A new Australian study explicitly compares the longevity costs of TV viewing to smoking. Presumably the research quality is comparable to other activist epidemiology, and the researchers pretend to, but fail to, separate out the effects of co-activities (snacking, drinking, and yes, smoking) and rival activities (exercise, being employed, having enough wealth to engage in other leisure). So will we be seeing restrictions on who can sell and buy televisions? We cannot wait to see what “plain packaging” looks like — no posted viewing times, content descriptions or promotions?http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/08/16/tv-watching-lifespan.html?ref=rss

…even so, competition is tough for the region’s nanny-of-the-year title
And we are not talking about a tiny monarchy on a mountaintop this time. Carlo Fonseka, of the National Authority on Tobacco and Alcohol in Sri Lanka, is asking TV broadcasters to run continual warning messages along the bottom of the screen whenever scenes involving tobacco or alcohol are being shown. So far, no one has though of requiring viewing a prohibitionist lecture before viewing. Also, murder and rape are apparently still fine to watch. We are reminded of our post (coincidentally, the same one linked above re Avatar) that reported on the Nic Cage movie, 8mm, an incredibly disturbing and graphic portrayal of sexual violence and murder, airing during after-school hours in Bangkok. Fortunately, they pixellated out the cigarettes Cage was smoking, so no harm done.http://www.dailynews.lk/2011/08/18/news01.asp

…and China is discovering that moderate policy changes just generate more demands
China is doubling the size of their text warnings on cigarettes, but local tobacco control people seem to think this will be ineffective because only the FCTC’s magic 30% coverage of the packages with emotional-violence graphics actually changes people’s behavior. Or something like that. It is amazing that in China, one place where educating smokers with genuine warnings (i.e., information, not emotion) could make a big difference in consumption, the activists are more worried about compliance with WHO dictates than education.http://english.eastday.com/e/110811/u1a6046955.html http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=479756&type=National

Plain packaging could increase cigarette sales
A study out of the Montreal Economic Institute suggests that plain packaging could lead to a marketing emphasis on price (since it reduces the perceived quality differences), making cigarettes cheaper, and thus removing that incentive to cut down. Maybe someone will pay attention to this when it does not come from BAT Australia (for those who do not recall, a similar BAT analysis a couple of months ago was dismissed and spun by the government, and thus the media, as being a petulant threat rather than the economic science that it was).http://www.iedm.org/35937-plain-packaging-and-its-unintended-consequences

University of Alberta study suggest obesity is not an independent risk
It is not an important study, but it is an interesting personal note, since we were seriously harassed at UA and by the newspaper that reported this for reporting inconvenient (to the nanny-statists) truths about nicotine and tobacco. Perhaps this researcher is about to become the victim of a harassment campaign, or perhaps this is evidence that obesity is not quite yet “the new smoking” as has been claimed.http://www.edmontonjournal.com/health/study+rewrites+book+obesity/5259891/story.html

**Note to readers: If you have written something you wish to see included in the weekly readings, or produce a relevant news feed that we might be missing, please call it to our attention. If you think we missed a specific THR story of note in the previous week, let us know and we can include it the following week. Finally, if you figure you are someone whose feed we are using to help us collect stories — you can probably guess who you are — and would like to be sure to get an occasional hat-tip, let us know and we would be glad to do it (and please do the same for us if we are helping you).

By THR.o Staff|Comments Off on Weekly suggested reading in Tobacco Harm Reduction – 17 August 2011

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Role and History of this blog

This blog was created by Prof. Carl V Phillips's TobaccoHarmReduction.org research and education group at the University of Alberta School of Public Health. The earlier posts were the work product of that group. Subsequent to THRo leaving the UASPH, this blog continued as an independent project with no institutional affiliation. All content represents only the views of the individual author.
TobaccoHarmReduction.org and Phillips became part of CASAA in 2012. Phillips has remained an occasional contributor to this blog, but those contributions are one-off personal comments; he no longer has any editorial influence over other contributors. This blog has never been affiliated with CASAA.

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